Program Notes
Program Notes by
Steven Ledbetter
Juan Crisostomo Arriaga
Overture to Los esclavos felices
Juan Crisostomo Jacobo Antonio Arriaga y
Balzola was born in Bilbao on January 27, 1806, and
died in Paris on January 17, 1826, ten days before
his twentieth birthday. He composed his only opera,
Los esclavos felices (The happy slaves) in Bilbao in
1820. The score calls for two each of flutes, oboes,
clarinets, bassoons, and horns, plus timpani and
strings. Duration is about 8 minutes.
We frequently
lament the fact that Mozart died when he was just
thirty-six years old and that Schubert died at
thirty-one. Yet compared to “the Spanish Mozart”
Arriaga, these two short‑ lived masters would seem
to have lived a full life. Surely no other composer
who died in his teens has written music that is
performed by professional orchestras! With Mozart
and Schubert, Purcell, Bizet, Mendelssohn, and any
number of other short-lived composers, we regret
their early demise, yet each of them left
unsurpassed masterpieces. With Arriaga, we have only
brilliant intimations.
Very little
is known about his early life in Bilbao, but he must
have begun musical studies at an extremely early
age, since his only opera, Los esclavos felices
was performed before his fifteenth birthday. At the
Paris Conservatory, he studied violin under Baillot
and harmony and counterpoint with Fétis, who wrote
the fullest account of Arriaga’s short life. Once at
the conservatory Arriaga quickly advanced, making
rapid progress on the violin and earning a second
prize in counterpoint and fugue after two years of
study. He devoted himself intensively to
composition, producing a symphony and three string
quartets, an overture, a mass, a Stabat mater,
cantatas and songs (the quartets were the only work
to be published in his lifetime and form the basis
of his reputation).
The works
composed before his conservatory training are in the
light-textured Italian style of the day, consisting
of a melodic line supported by accompaniment. The
later works show an easy mastery of contrapuntal
devices allied with the melodic grace of the Italian
style in which he grew up, and this combination
justifies the epithet “the Spanish Mozart” that has
been applied to him (especially when his music was
rediscovered by Spanish musical nationalists late in
the nineteenth century).
Arriaga may
have been presented to the examiners at the Paris
Conservatoire as a violinist totally lacking in
theoretical training, but such a composer would be
hardly likely to have written an overture like that
to Los esclavos felices, described as an
“opera semiseria,” a work in that branch of Italian
opera in which a serious—potentially tragic—plot is
given a happy ending; it is a tradition to which
Rossini had been making significant contributions in
the decade before Arriaga’s work (La gazza ladra
is an example), and the likelihood is that the boy
learned a great deal from Rossini’s example. The
overture is in the Italian style, with a slow
introduction whose character might be aptly
described as Mozartean followed by a compact
sonata-form allegro (without development) whose
sparkle sounds to my ears like an echo of Rossini.
It is an altogether remarkable achievement for a
fourteen-year-old composer, one that justifies
lamentation over the fact that he had less than six
years to live.
SAMUEL BARBER
Violin Concerto, Opus 14
Samuel Barber was born in West Chester,
Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New
York, on January 23, 1981. He composed the
Violin Concerto in the spring of 1939, on a
commission from Samuel Fels. Albert Spalding gave
the first performance, with the Philadelphia
Orchestra under the direction of Eugene
Ormandy, on February 7 and 8, 1941. In addition to
the solo violin, the score calls for pairs of
flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and
trumpets, plus timpani, percussion, piano, and
strings. Duration is about 25 minutes.
Samuel Barber
grew up in a musical family. His aunt was the great
contralto Louise Homer, whose husband, Sidney Homer,
was a composer. Barber began play the piano at six
and compose the following year. It was Sam’s uncle
Sidney who encouraged his composition most with
letters full of advice. By the time the boy was
seventeen, his aunt had begun including some of his
early songs on her recital programs. His musical
technique developed during the eight years he spent
as a student at the Curtis Institute in
Philadelphia, where he joined its first class in
1924 (when he was just fourteen). There he studied
piano, composition (with Rosario Scalero),
conducting (with Fritz Reiner), and voice.
Barber’s
style was always conservative, emphasizing the long
lyrical line and relatively traditional tonal
harmonies. His setting of language was felicitous,
and his ear for color acute. All of these strengths
made him for many years one of the most popular of
American composers. Though changes in the American
musical world after World War II gradually made
Barber feel that he was an outsider who had been
passed by, his music has been heard more frequently
again in recent years and appreciated for its craft
and expressive directness.
Barber
composed his Violin Concerto quite early in his
career, after he had sprung to instant prominence
when Arturo Toscanini performed two of his works.
This led to his first major commission, from Samuel
Fels, the maker of Fels Naptha Soap and a trustee of
the Curtis Institute. Fels’s adopted son was the
violinist Iso Briselli; it was for him that Fels
offered Barber $1000, in the spring of 1939, for a
violin concerto. He completed the finale by early
fall. Differences of opinion between Barber and
Briselli threatened to break the contract and leave
the composer without his full fee (he had been paid
half in advance). When Briselli saw the first two
movements in draft, he complained that they were
“too simple and not brilliant enough,” but this did
not bother Barber much, because he intended to close
with a virtuosic finale that would provide plenty of
flash.
Yet when the
finale was delivered, Briselli objected again. The
story has been told for a long time that he declared
it unplayable. Later he insisted that his only
objection was that he found it ineffective. In any
case, a test was held at the Curtis Institute to
convince Fels that Barber had in fact completed his
side of the deal. A young violinist there, Herbert
Baumel, was given a copy of the soloist’s part of
the last movement and told that he had two hours to
learn it and that he should return dressed to play
it (with a pianist) for a few people. The result was
the complete vindication of Barber. Fels paid the
remainder of the commission, and Briselli
relinquished the right of the first performance.
Ever afterward, Barber liked to refer to the piece
as the “concerto del sapone,” or “soap concerto.”
Since its premiere it has become the most often
performed and recorded violin concerto by an
American composer. Barber plays to his strengths as
a lyricist throughout the first two movements. The
soloist enters in the first bar, singing sweetly,
and the movement continues to unfold with only a few
outbursts from the orchestra, mostly growing out of
the contrasting figure, lightly syncopated, first
heard in the clarinet soon after the opening.
The slow
movement is one of the great lyrical effusions in
American music. The solo violin here waits through a
preparatory passage in the orchestra highlighting
the sweet sadness of what is to come, and then
enters pensively, building quickly to a subdued
passion that dominates the flow of the movement. The
movement builds gradually to its expressive climax,
then sinks back to the delicate world from which it
sprang.
The finale is
the shortest movement of all, but its lean
athleticism provides a superb foil to the sweet and
dreamy romanticism of what preceded it and provides
a most effective close.
WOLFGANG AMADÉ MOZART
Overture to Ascanio in Alba, K.111
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart was born in Salzburg,
Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on
December 5, 1791. He composed his opera Ascanio in
Alba in Milan during August and September 1771; the
first performance took place on October 17 in the
Regio Ducale Teatro there. The score of the overture
calls for flutes, oboes, English horns, and bassoons
in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani,
strings, and continuo. Duration is about 6 minutes.
In March 1771
Leopold Mozart confided to his wife that he had
received word of something that would represent “an
immortal honor” to his fifteen-year-old son. This
was evidently the first hint that Wolfgang was to be
commissioned to compose a serenata teatrale
to celebrate the forthcoming wedding in Milan of
Archduke Ferdinand (the third son of Emperor Francis
I) to Maria Beatrice Ricciarda d’Este, the only
daughter of the Duke of Modena. An older composer,
Johann Adolf Hasse, would write a serious opera for
the event. Mozart’s contribution was to be one in a
long line of celebratory quasi-theatrical works
composed to honor (and blatantly flatter) the
personages being married through comparison with
mythological characters.
When he
arrived in Milan, the libretto he was to set was not
available. Giuseppe Parini (1729-1799) was in
Vienna, making sure that his text was approved by
the imperial family. In the accepted version, Venus
descends to earth with a large retinue, including
her grandson Ascanius (the son of Aeneas, the Trojan
hero). She intends him to marry Sylvia, a nymph who
is the daughter of Hercules. Eventually, of course,
the marriage takes place happily, though how that
happens is irrelevant to an account of the overture.
What would
not surprise any attendee at this festive event
(since it was absolutely standard procedure in such
works) was the equating of the Empress Maria
Theresia in Vienna with the goddess Venus (as
grandmother to the groom) or naming the bride as a
daughter of Hercules, since the princess was, in
fact, the child of Ercole III d’Este, his given name
being the Italian equivalent of Hercules.
At first
Mozart waited for a libretto and joked, “Above us is
a violinist, below us another one, next to us a
singing teacher who gives lessons, and in the room
opposite ours an oboist. It’s fun when one composes.
One picks up many ideas.” But this hint that his
musical ideas were simply thefts of the tunes coming
through the walls was simply his typical playfulness
coming to the fore.
The approved
libretto arrived on August 29 and Mozart had
finished the overture two days later. When Mozart’s
serenata and Hasse’s opera were performed
as part of the wedding festivities in October, the
teenaged composer’s work was received with great
enthusiasm and performed three more times. The aged
Hasse, who had agreed to compose his opera only at
the repeated urging of the Empress, had been far
less successful. Leopold expressed sadness over the
fact that the old man’s work was so much less liked
than his son’s, but the letter seems to be filled
with crocodile tears. Nonetheless, Hasse himself
apparently thought highly of his young rival. At any
rate, there is a story—true or urban legend?—in
which Hasse predicted that Mozart’s music would
cause all other contemporary composers to be
forgotten.
The overture
to the opera is the usual bustling introduction
designed to signal to the audience that the opera
was about to begin. (In those days of candle-lit
theaters, the lights could not be lowered, as they
are today, to convey that information.) Soon after
the premiere, Mozart reused the overture and the
opening movement of Scene I (ballet music marked
Andante grazioso) as the first two movements of a
symphony by adding a finale (K.120) to the two
existing movements.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Symphony No. 2 in B‑flat major, D.125
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Liechtental,
a suburb of Vienna, on January 31, 1797, and died in
Vienna on November 19, 1828. He began his Symphony
No. 2 on December 10, 1814, and finished it on March
14, 1815. There may have been a reading of the
symphony soon after its completion by the orchestra
of the Vienna seminary where Schubert had been a
student and to whose director he dedicated the
manuscript score. It was likely performed privately,
too, by an amateur orchestra that had grown out of
the Schubert family string quartet, but the first
public performance was not given until October 20,
1877, when August Manns conducted the work at the
Crystal Palace in London. The score calls for two
each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two
horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration
is about 29 minutes.
A few months
before his eleventh birthday, young Schubert was
accepted as a choirboy in the Imperial court chapel.
This meant that his further education was carried on
in the principal boarding school for commoners, the
Imperial and Royal City College. Here he
distinguished himself both in music and his other
academic subjects as well. An excellent student
orchestra was already in existence by the time of
Schubert’s arrival, and the young man’s playing
quickly made him the leader of the first violins.
While still
in school Schubert composed his first symphonies,
the climactic works of his teen years, and his
earliest entries onto the stage that in Vienna had
been dominated by Haydn and Mozart and in which
Beethoven was currently the towering figure. The
orchestra played symphonies and overtures of Haydn
and Mozart, as well as the first two symphonies of
Beethoven. (The “Eroica” was still regarded as far
too fearsomely difficult for even a crack student
ensemble, much as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
was regarded for decades in the twentieth century.)
Schubert left
the college at the end of October 1813, probably at
his family’s insistence that he enter a training
school for elementary teachers so that he could
support himself. But already by this time he had
completed his first symphony and probably heard a
performance by his own school orchestra. The Second
took him three months, longer than the first,
probably a sign that he was wrestling with the scope
and musical architecture in this substantial work.
Possibly there was a reading of the symphony by the
orchestra of his former school, for he dedicated the
work to its director. But there were no public
performances for more than sixty years, a half
century after the composer’s own death.
Of course so
youthful a work naturally reflects the influence of
the composers whose music Schubert most admired—but
who can be faulted for absorbing influences from
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven?
The energetic
and vivacious first movement already demonstrates
Schubert’s manner of fashioning thematic material at
some length, though always keeping the forward
motion, even in moments of lyric contrast. The
second movement is a set of five variations on an
apparently simple theme in E-flat major.
Traditionally one variation (here it is the fourth)
is in the related minor key of C minor, and Schubert
picks up that tonality for the minuet movement.
(This was unusual; in his day the dance movement was
almost always in the home key of the symphony.)
The very opening—just a few short measures—of the
finale seems to begin in the middle of an idea, but
it suddenly turns into a cheerful and bouncy tune
that the young composer puts through its paces with
energy and good humor.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)